Pella Windows & Doors

Pella’s challenge: Supporting custom-built products with the first-ever digital D2C windows and doors buying experience

According to Rebecca Hicks, Senior Digital Product Manager at Pella, the company recognized that it was missing out on customers who would prefer a digital buying experience with transparent pricing to traditional in-home consultations. But launching a digital D2C window and door buying experience came with a major challenge: the customized nature of the products meant nobody had ever done it before.

“Nobody in our industry had ever put together a digital experience that got anywhere close to the level of product customization and configuration we required,” Rebecca said. “To some extent, and to some people, it would have seemed practically impossible to bring this to life.”

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The challenges were considerable. During purchase, a shopper buying a sample Pella window has to custom designate…

• Measurements of width, height, and depth that can be tuned to 0.125 inch increments.
• Four or five different options for packaging – including sound control, energy efficiency, and more.
• The option to select hinged glass panels
• Six different insulated glass options
• Two different choices for glass strength
• The designation for high altitude glass
• The choice between gas filled and air filled glass
• Choices for venting
• Eight different interior finishes
• 15 different exterior colors
• Multiple exterior paint grades
• The choice of grilles or no grilles on the window
• Six types of hardware finish
• The choice of a screen on each window unit
• Four types of screen color
• New construction or replacement installation method
  

In other words, each purchase a consumer makes from Pella is hugely customized and configurable. The hyper-specific dimensions mean Pella must support 8 octillion product variations to merchandise a product.

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Rebecca says that this amount of customization and configuration would have choked Pella’s existing monolithic technology, which didn’t have the flexibility or horsepower to bring these customized, configurable solutions to life.

In fact, Pella’s configure, price, quote (CPQ) tool required customers to answer around 50 questions to purchase a single product – a poor customer experience that threatened to crush conversion rates.

The desire to launch a new digital D2C buying experience risked overwhelming Pella’s merchandisers with massive SKU explosion and swamping its enterprise resource planning (ERP) data management system with product information for octillions of specific SKUs based on hyper-specific dimensions.

Rebecca says her team evaluated potential commerce platforms with a host of questions:

• How could Pella merchandise these highly-configurable windows and doors online without literally swamping its system and merchandisers?
• Would it be possible to offer real-time pricing updates as online shoppers configured their windows?
• Could Pella integrate preferred best-of-breed vendors into its commerce solution? Would integrating these vendors introduce complexity, or be fast, simple, and in service of a high-performing site?
• Was it possible to get all these capabilities without being locked into a rigid platform that didn’t allow for changes as Pella’s business grew and changed?

Pella’s solution: A flexible Elastic Path solution that brought the best of customizable, in-home consultations to the digital world

As Pella evaluated commerce platforms, the team decided that Elastic Path alone could meet its business needs and simplify complexity into a fast, dynamic, high-performing commerce experience.

Rebecca says that Pella is unique in that selecting a commerce platform wasn’t a top-down decision. Instead, Pella deputized the developers who would work on the solution to have conversations with five different commerce vendors. In the end, Rebecca says, Pella’s team pushed hard for Elastic Path.

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Elastic Path’s API-first, composable architecture meant that Pella could quickly integrate with existing and preferred vendors, like Algolia for search. Elastic Path’s API-first, composable architecture meant that Pella could quickly integrate with existing and preferred vendors, like Algolia for search. At the heart of Pella's solution is Product Experience Manager, the adaptable commerce PIM, catalog, and pricing management tool native to the Elastic Path Composable Commerce platform.

Imperatively, Elastic Path was able to support flexible cart capabilities using Custom Cart Items, a unique capability which allows Pella to process orders for any product, even those that haven’t been saved in the Elastic Path Composable Commerce platform. This way, Pella avoids the massive SKU explosion and enterprise resource planning (ERP) data management challenges that would come from adding and maintaining millions of products based on hyper-specific dimensions.

All told, it took only five months to get the solution live and in front of consumers. Since launch, Rebecca says that Pella’s team – from developers to merchandisers to marketers – has found the platform intuitive and easy to use, enabling more innovation, fast changes, and synchronized teams.

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Rebecca also credits Elastic Path’s flexible platform for its “plug-and-play” architecture. Pella didn’t want to build the solution from scratch, and has been able to scale new experiences because of the pre-integrations to top components available on the Elastic Path platform.

The actual results of Pella’s digital D2C commerce investment have been staggering. Pella didn’t just launch the first – and only – D2C online buying experience for windows and doors. It also used this digital channel to solve nagging business problems, like the amount of time to generate quotes for a specific window or door – which has gone from 90 seconds to 14 seconds.

Results of Pella’s commerce investment include…

• 7X reduction in time to generate quotes
• 40% decrease in cart abandonment rates
• 66% reduction in the number of configuration questions
• 514 millisecond largest contentful paint, nearly 400% faster than the Google benchmark of 2.5 seconds for a web page's main content to load.

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For a shopper, the qualitative result of the Pella digital storefront is a visually-pleasing experience with transparent, dynamic pricing.

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Also included in the storefront is a deep reservoir of informational content about the products. This way, integrated into the evaluation and purchasing experience, customers get a version of the consultation and explanations they would traditionally get from a sales representative.

A piece-by-piece problem solving approach that builds a commerce solution over time and solves business problems fast

Rebecca says that one of the core values of the Elastic Path platform is the ability to solve commerce challenges over time, piece-by-piece, without risking disruption to the entire solution.

For Pella, the flexible nature of the platform has meant taking what Rebecca calls an “and then” approach to commerce development – Pella started with the cart, and then optimized accounts, and then improved promotions, and then integrated a new payments offer, and on-and-on. “If we would have had to do all of that from the inception of the solution, we wouldn’t have driven value to the customers quickly, and would have risked tech debt,” Rebecca says.

In addition to iteratively optimizing a commerce solution over time, Rebecca says that Elastic Path’s flexible platform has made it possible to solve specific business problems fast.

One example: Rebecca and her team noticed an uptick in cart abandonment, which was traced to not offering any financing at checkout, forcing customers to put everything on a credit card. They called Elastic Path, evaluated options, and made the decision to integrate PayPal.

It took days to get the integration live and launched on the site, and within weeks, Pella increased conversion rates by more than 15%. Rebecca calls this experience “a major short-term business win and a long-term experience boost for our customers that was only possible with support from Elastic Path.”

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Pella’s future: Using a flexible commerce solution to adjust and adapt to changing business needs

In the context of Pella’s entire business, the digital D2C commerce experience isn’t the company’s biggest revenue driver. But Rebecca says that learnings from the D2C digital commerce experience are informing the way that Pella goes to market – and engaging with customers – in all its transaction channels.

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In particular, Rebecca notes that after improving price quote generation time by 80%+, her digital commerce team was given ownership of the entire quoting experience for all channels. Now, the price quote learnings from the digital commerce channel are applied to Pella’s partnership with Lowe’s, to in-home appointments with Pella Pro Dealers, and anywhere else that the company can work on shielding the customer from complexity and upleveling the transaction experience.

Rebecca also says that Elastic Path’s flexibility and fast tech stack changes can help support expansion into new regions and streamlined multi-channel operations. Plus, being faster and more efficient with delivering on-site commerce has freed up time, resources, and expertise to enhance customer self-education experiences like blogs and virtual consultations – aiding buyers who are making major purchases.

Overall, Rebecca says that as the digital D2C commerce experience expands in reach and influences more parts of Pella’s organization, Elastic Path has earned the trust to remain an integral, trusted partner for growth.